We then occupied our time with a visit to Shark Reef, the Mandalay Bay aquarium. It's very elaborately decorated, in a sort of ancient Roman theme again for no reason. And transparent tunnels run through these ancient ruins, through which you can walk and be surrounded by sharks. And that was completely entertaining for the fifteen minutes we were there.

Mandalay Bay is famous for having the best pool in town, but it looked horrible to me. It had lots of gimmicks like wave machines and water slides, so I guess that's something, but the ratio of guest to pool was terrible. The pools were surrounded by an army of deck chairs about ten rows deep, so it seemed like you might as well sunbathe in the parking lot and get the same experience.

We didn't really have a plan for Las Vegas during the day. I decided to treat it like a European vacation (not like the movie, which would probably have been more fun). We just went sightseeing around each hotel, treating each like a palace or museum. But I wildly overestimated their entertainment value. There's really not much to see, and it doesn't even register high on the kitsch scale. So we ended up doing a quick walkaround each property, then shopping and gambling a bit and moving on.



Our first stop was Mandalay Bay, which is supposed to be pretty high end and geared to a party crowd. It's one of the ugliest of the hotels on the outside, a gold embossed suburban office tower, and its location is almost suburban as well, right at the very end of the Strip and somewhat hard to get to. It's supposed to have an Asian theme, which I guess is where they got the name from, although as I'm sure you remember from the bloggers' visit to Mandalay, it's in the middle of Burma so it doesn't have a bay. In any event, the Asian theme is very understated, in fact, invisible. It had more happening bars and restaurants than the Bellagio, and seemed geared to a college kids on spring break sort of crowd.